Customer Rating:  
Summary: must-read for Managers & CEO's
Comment: A VERY good book and highly recommended for Project Managers and even Sales Rep's and upper management, who will understand this book because it's simple and full of colorful screenshots. Not recommended for web designers, as they should have been reading the author's monthly column (and Tufte) for the past few years and this book is simply preaching to the choir. Don't know what i'm talking about? get the book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Worth reading but take it with a grain of salt
Comment: This latest endeavor of one of the more renowned authorities in usability design strives to give a complete account of what is involved in the design of a successful web-site. While Nielsen uses many real-life examples to illustrate his points, I find more than a few of his assertions a little suspect. In some situations, he over-simplifies and describes the outcome of the problem in terms of "black and white", not allowing for any shades of gray. Whether Nielsen is successful in getting his points across is questionable due to this black and white approach. However, he does bring up a lot of timely issues for designing on the web such as response times and overly flashy graphics.The tone of the book is definitely overbearing and opinionated, nevertheless, his style of writing does make the book very readable. If you need to know the basics of designing interfaces for the web, this book will serve as a good reference. My suggestion is that you take his words with a grain of salt and not worry too much if you have to break one or two of his cherished "top-ten" rules of interface design.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Required reading
Comment: Anyone who wants to design more than 5 web pages should be required to outline the major points in Jakob Nielsen's Designing Web Usability. Anyone who is hiring someone to design a web site should read this book first. Anyone who uses the internet as a regular source of information will tend to scream "YES" when Nielsen points out examples of bad web design.Jakob Nielsen's book describes a way of thinking about the World Wide Web. It is not a how-to book tied to a particular software package. He simply wants the internet to be a useful place where communication takes place. He talks about what a web page should be like rather than focusing on the HTML required to create it. He illustrates his ideas with many examples of sites that work and ones that don't. As a result, it is one of those rare computer books that will still be useful 5 years from now. Much of the information in the book seems obvious. After all, isn't communication the goal of a web page? Yet I would guess that after reading a chapter of Nilsen's book, you could identify significant design problems in the majority of web sites. Read all of the chapters and you'll begin to understand what it takes to create powerful web sites. Dale Fast fast@sxu.edu
Customer Rating:
Summary: Nielsen is a dinosaur.
Comment: The book is banned at our company. We feel is will stunt the creative growth of our employees. For the life of me, I can't understand how anyone who's been doing web work for a while would take Jakon Nielsen seriously. This man is *severely* out of touch with the industry, but mixes in just enough common sense for the sheep of the web design world to proclaim him an expert.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Users First In Web Site Design
Comment: Jakob Nielsen has employed his useability skills to produce this excellent, insightful and well-written book. Putting aside current technologies and gadgetry, this book deals very practically with what makes web sites compelling and useful for people. His style is very readable and there are so many good, worthwhile ideas, that applying just a handful will make a difference to how you build and think about web pages/sites. But beyond the individual suggestions, this book challenges you to re-align your view to that of customer/user experience and goals, in much the same way as Alan Cooper's "The Inmates Are Running The Asylum" does for traditional application development. An enjoyable book that makes you frustrated by the current crop of shortsighted, poorly designed sites.
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